InsaneJournal

David Eddings, discussions and archivising.
So Aki and I got to talking about David Eddings, because I had - for some ungodly reason - decided to re-read The Malloreon/The Elenium/The Tamuli and posted about it in my wordcount-thread on TSR. After talking on and off about Eddings' work for almost a month, we decided it might be good to archive our discussion somewhere, in case someone else wanted to take part or just read our mad ramblings.

So I'm putting it here - each post in my wordcount thread will be a separate post here as well, so anyone who wants to comment can jump in wherever they want.

I've discovered why I like Elenium/Tamuli better than the Belgariad/Malloreon - when I close the last book of the Malloreon, I feel as if nothing has really happened. They have merely restored a status quo, and the only one who really changed at all was Kal Zakath - Garion, Mandorallen, Silk; they're all the same from the first page of the Belgariad to the last page of the Malloreon. Yes, I know that stuff happens to them and they appear to change their minds about things, but nothing really changes. They never move beyond being Fantasy Archetypes (Garion is the epitome of Farmboy Grows Up and Learns That He's A King), and so remain boring.

In Elenium/Tamuli, most of the characters are adults from the very beginning - we're never given a definite age for Sparhawk, but I assume that he is at least well into his thirties, if not forties, in The Diamond Throne, and Sir Bevier is called referred to as "young" a few times, and he is 29 in TDT. As such, Eddings really can't use the aging of a child as a shorthand substitute for character growth the way he does with Garion. The characters are still pretty static - most of the changes don't really take place until Tamuli, and even then they aren't very big - but they somehow feel more interesting than the Belgariad equivalent. Perhaps it's because none of the knights can be clearly put into any of the Generic Character Slots that Eddings seems so fond of - Sparhawk has a bad temper, Tynian likes to talk, Bevier is very devout and Ulath is quiet and speaks the language of the trolls, but otherwise, they're pretty much the same archetype (warriors of the... enthusiastic kind nyah!).

Eddings does more with small, individual differences between characters in Elenium/Tamuli than he does in the Belgariad - both Tynian and Ulath like to tell stories to pass the time or lighten up their company, but Tynian likes to make himself the main character whereas Ulath is happy to talk about "This one man I know..." and then fill in all sorts of details. All of them are happy to dole out violence, but while Ulath and Kalten will dish out beheadings anywhere, any time, Sparhawk, Tynian and Bevier tend to hold back. They're all Church Knights, but out of all of them, only Bevier really bothers to pray and follow all the rules. Tynian prefaces all of his suggestions with "Can I make a suggestion?". It's all little things, but they add up eventually.

'Sides, the politics are more fun, and more complicated, in Elenium/Tamuli than they are in the Belgariad. Also, The Guardians of the West (the first book of the Malloreon) is basically one big prologue to the rest of the series, and I despise prologues.

Let's not talk about my itch to write fanfiction of Elenium/Tamuli and improve it a bit. I don't ship Ulath/Tynian, Sephrenia/Vanion (canon!) or Bevier/Khalad, I promise.